Initially this website was hosted on GitHub pages, using jekyll and some theme. I’d needed a site up and running quickly so the domain I’d listed on my CV actually existed.
This seemed like a suitable solution at the time. It was quick to set up, didn’t require me to set up infrastructure of my own and looked alright. What I didn’t realise was how much control I was giving up, and to who. Since then I’ve grown more wary of “”“big tech”“” (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix), with good reason. I’ve started distancing myself from these companies as best I can, lifted-and-shifted the static site generated by Jekyll to a non-AWS vps (that I still have my reservations about, since I don’t control the hardware).
In an attempt to regain more control over the software I use, I also shifted my email onto there from the company that provided my DNS to the same box and set up git on there, pushing updates to both “”“my”“” instance, and GitHub.
All the dependencies on Jekyll, Ruby Gems and the theme I was using found themselves in my sights too. There’s nothing particularly complex about static website generation, so why was there this entire ruby-based builder nonsense? Why was I having to pull in gems with securty issues just to generate some HTML? It seemed like this could be achieved with much simpler, mature, familiar unix tools.
Since I was already hosting a number of my projects both on GitHub and this instance, and I already had a webserver set up to serve the Jekyll guff it was pretty easy to migrate away from Jekyll.
I set up a server-side git hook that parsed the Markdown files that were being consumed by Jekyll. This did introduce a dependency on discount, but it removed a lot of dependencies on ruby guff. If need be I’d be comfortable writing my own Markdown implementation too.
You can view the source for the site, including the scripts that the server-side git hook calls either through the git link here and at the top of the page, or on GitHub.
With discount generating the post HTML, it was trivial to throw together a few header HTML files, a stylesheet and a few scripts to glue it all together.
One of the big things this allowed me to do was to implement a remote staging environment. This lets me view the site on this instance with pushed to the ‘develop’ branch before merging to ‘master’ and deploying to what you’re seeing now. This is pretty valuable since I’m running a different distro (gawk vs mawk caught me out, didn’t realise that gensub() was a gawk extension).
Deployments are considerably faster than using Jekyll too, since the site generation is much faster.
I had some tagging functionality with jekyll that I’ve not implemented, but with the amount of posts that I had on the site it really wasn’t necessary. If I actually need tagging in the future then I’ll implement it.